


fleur du mal

by thesilverfactory



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Emetophobia, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Canon, incredibly surreal childhood memories, magical thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21940882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverfactory/pseuds/thesilverfactory
Summary: When Jack was very small, he thought he would rather be a garden than a boy.(Jack Fairy, before the emerald pin.)
Kudos: 10





	fleur du mal

_Dublin_

_1953_

When Jack was very small, he thought he would rather be a garden than a boy. 

Metamorphosis seemed the easiest thing in the world, then. He smothered himself in wet earth, filled even his nose and mouth and ears, and pressed wildflower seeds into the fertile bed of his skull. He lay still beneath the sun and dreamt of all the colours the flowers would be: shocking pink dahlias for his cheeks and mouth, whorls of peonies for his eyes, baby’s breath.

He dreamt and dreamt, and dizzy spots appeared behind his eyelids. Something cool and wet wriggled down the neck of his jumper, then across his naked chest. Something brushed his lips — a finger saying _hush_ — and shrank away in the darkness. He tried not to think what that might be. 

Instead, he sent a prayer beyond the sun and deep into the sky, all the way to where it was God lived, that it wouldn’t be long before he came into bloom. 

(x) 

Later, after several uncomfortable hours at the doctor’s, Mam begged to know why he’d done it. She had on her lambskin gloves, softened by a fragrance of talcum and cold cream, when she touched his face. By now Jack was wilted and sick, having been twice dosed with black syrup to bring up the swallowed dirt. A basin of his vomit sat, reeking shamefully, on a table nearby.

“I only wanted to be beautiful,” he croaked. Lifting his chin, he searched her eyes for something understandable, or something like understanding. Beautiful like the peacocks in his fairytale book and the porcelain angels on Maimeó’s mantle, or like butterfly wings, or lace, or the stained glass pictures of Mary and Jesus on the church windows, or anything in the world, really, that wasn’t a human boy. He wanted to lie in the earth, flourishing and admired, and to never get up. “That’s all.” 

“Mrs Farrell,” the doctor said, returning. “A word, if you please.” 

Mam moved her hand from Jack’s cheek, and she and the doctor disappeared behind a blue curtain. Jack could see her silhouette illuminated by sunlight, and could hear a little of their whispering. Mam’s voice had gone thin, as it did when she and Da quarreled at night.

Jack shut his eyes and fiddled with the ring he kept in his pocket, putting his finger through its golden orbit, making out the shape of the carved coral rose by touch. Mam did not yet know he had taken it, and this secret comforted him. Her jewellery box was full of such wondrously nice things to look at, to hold, that sometimes he couldn’t help himself. When he was ever so slightly smaller, Jack had loved to climb upon her dressing table and nest among the powders and bottles of perfume. From there he would lift the box’s lid and watch, scarcely blinking, as its insides twinkled unendingly. This beauty seemed more lasting than the sun’s. The sun set; the jewels still twinkled. And it was a beauty you could have for your own.

Jack tried to take only the littlest things — a stick pin, a lipstick — but sometimes he longed to cram lavaliers like hard candies into his mouth. It was a bad thing to want. Da had once given him ten strokes for putting a rope of pearls about his neck, and Mam had cried like something shattering. That was just before Mass, and the marks had burned as Jack sat listening to God’s high, cold silence. 

Someday Jack hoped to have nice things of his own. Now, though, he had only flowers, which he pressed inside his book of constellations so they would look as if they were blooming in the stars. Flowers — the stolen ring. For the rest of his becoming, it seemed he would have to wait a while yet. 

(x) 

When Da came home that evening, Jack was lying underneath the piano with a sick bowl and a glass of MiWadi beside him, drawing birds on a yellow pad. Jack paused at the creak of shoes and glanced up watchfully, lowering himself flat and small against the floor as he did. He worried the edge of the carpet. Coppery threads of his own hair were caught like cobwebs in the fringe.

Da did not say hello. 

Jack wouldn’t know until much later that his father was afraid of him. He was afraid, and that was what made him so angry and cold. Even then — long before St. Conal’s Hospital, where lithium pills would stretch Jack famine-thin, and longer still before London’s nightclubs and tearooms — Da must’ve sensed Jack was somehow unnatural, malformed, a chimera of masculine and feminine and scarcely human qualities. Looking at his child, Seamus Farrell only ever saw a demon draped in pearls. Jack could forgive him for that; years later, in hazy lavatory mirrors, he would sometimes see the same thing. Pearlstrung demon, formed from rotting flowers and lipstick and smoke. 

Jack set down his green crayon. For a moment their gazes joined, and they were silently afraid of each other. Jack would remember that: lying in his father’s shadow, half-sheltered by the piano, afraid. 

“Your mother tells me you had a bit of an accident today,” Da said. “She tells me she had to dig you up from the garden because you’d choked yourself half to death on dirt.” 

Jack stared somberly into Da’s face, which was bare of whiskers since last week, but had a little of its thorny yellow moustache left. He didn’t think he had ever gotten a kiss from Da, and wondered what that would feel like, if it would be scratchy. Jack did not like the look of the raw rough skin. He thought again of the rub of earth over his face, the itch of things failing to take root. 

“I only wanted…” Jack began to explain, but stopped. It was useless. Da already knew what Jack would say, or something like it, for that broken-off sentence was the sum of Jack’s every act and word. ... _To be beautiful_ , Jack finished in his head. 

In the kitchen, the kettle wailed, and Mam’s feet moved toward it. Birds fluted outside. Jack balled one hand around a brass pedal and held himself still.

“Up,” Da ordered. He removed his spectacles and set them upon his writing desk. “Get up with you. Before it’s dark.” 

Jack unfolded slowly, lingering over the sick foam in the bowl and the unfinished bird, its green wing like a torn leaf. He pressed his thumb to the hurt place, then went to fetch the rattan cane. 

The back garden was changed from the morning — shadowed now, no longer gleaming, the open door of the loo like a humid black mouth. Everything was filmy with dirt. Jack braced himself against the ivy-wall, though he kept his eyes on the unearthed patch where he had lain earlier that day. He kept his voice steady to count. 

Da sensed then what Jack was. But he did not know about the ring that glittered, starlike, in the dark of Jack’s pocket. He could hit Jack all he wished, and still he wouldn’t know.

**Author's Note:**

> The garden incident portrayed here is loosely based on the childhood of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli.


End file.
